Clark University will host Film Making, Creativity, Migrant Biographies, Diasporic Disruption, a conversation with internationally acclaimed film director Gurinder Chadha and Clark Sociology Professor Parminder Bhachu, at 6 p.m. Monday, Oct. 24, in Dana Commons, 950 Main St. The event is free and open to the public.

Chadha is one of the most successful female film directors in the world; she has directed more than 15 films. Her internationally-successful film Bend It Like Beckham (2002) was the highest grossing British-financed, British-distributed film ever in UK box office history until the more recent success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Her other notable films include Bhaji on the Beach (1993), Bride and Prejudice (2004) and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (2008). Her new film The Viceroy’s House, on the partition of India and Pakistan, will be released in early 2017.

Chadha started a media career in radio in the mid-1980s then moved into television as a BBC news reporter. She directed award-winning documentaries for the British Film Institute, BBC and Channel Four, and in 1989 released the documentary I’m British but…, which followed the lives of young British Asians. Many of Chadha’s films draw on her personal experience of being an Indian and English at the same time and how she dealt with the duality of her identity.

Parminder Bhachu is a professor of sociology and an urban anthropologist from London who has been a citizen of Worcester for 25 years. She is a scholar of diasporic economic, cultural and creative forms in global domains. Her publications and research focus on multiple migrants, whose second- and third-generation progeny – which includes Gurinder Chadha – are some of the most cutting-edge, creative agents in the world, spearheading creativity in the fields of technology, science, art, music, performance, architecture and film. She was Henry R. Luce Professor of Cultural Identities and Global Processes for nine years and served as director of Clark’s Women’s Studies Program.

Professor Bhachu is the author of Dangerous Designs: Asian Women Fashion the Dispora Economics (2004) and Twice Migrants (1985) and is co-editor of Immigration and Entrepreneurship: Culture, Capital and Ethnic Networks (1993) and Enterprising Women: Ethnicity, Economy & Gender Relations (1988). She is currently working on a book, Disruptive Diasporas: Migrant Creativity and Innovation in Hyper-Connected Worlds.

For more information, call 508-793-7599.